Developer Diary 35

This number cost me around 120 hours of work. Steady 75 FPS in Virtual Reality with Open World Streaming System, Day Night Rhythm, AI and while calling the Dharmapalas (also during Flight).

Developer Diary 34 From 30 FPS to 60 FPS

Sony released a quality threshold for VR games: Any game with a standard FPS rate below 60 FPS will get rejected. For the last two weeks I've been optimizing the project like hell to reach that number. With everything so far I'm almost getting up to a constant 55 FPS from the original 30 FPS with some performance spikes during large scenes and landscapes ...

- New Ocean Blueprint
- Total AI Overhaul (AI is now entirely relying on collision volumes for animations and DMG )
- Removed early Z-Pass
- Shadow settings overhaul
- Bought InstaLOD and created LODs for all landscapes and major meshes
- Incorporated those LODs (I'm still finetuning each setting, sometimes rebuilding them all)
- Post Process system overhaul (Removed a lot of settings in favor of Bloom)
- Incorporated the Oculus Forward Renderer for UE4 as seen in the Showdown Demo
- Created a holistic system of Culling Volumes
- Identified the Mip Map GPU performance bug (which lowered the PIE play for about 15 fps...)

Developer Diary 33 - Beaches, Bridges, Towers, Foliage

Damn ... I want to cut the trailer soooo badly. But I need to pull myself together and finish all setdressing elements first. I was working on the beaches today and made a couple of tests with instanced rock meshes. I'm not far off. Maybe another month or two and I'm there....

Developer Diary 32 Updates

This is what I've been working on for the last two weeks:

- Implemented Underwater Lightshafts and Random Fish Swarm Particle FX
- Lightshafts and Fish move with the rising Sea once the Manta is called
- Optimized the Ocean Blueprint to save FPS during gameplay
- Changed Water Reflection and Ocean Wave Material
- Created a script for the Exponential Height Fog component to rise with sea level

- Added AI for the Obersturmführer and Wehrmacht NPC
- Implemented Kill and Impact Volumes for Rifle Shots and set up associated Damage Scripts

- Fixed Dharmapala Scripts for Guivre, Pegasus, Begtse, Mahakala and Geruda.
- Created separate blueprints for each island building surrounding the monastery
- Replaced all previous meshes with Blueprints
- Created Visibility Volumes for each Building Blueprint
- Implemented "Tick Inactivity" when Blueprints are culled from the Viewport (massive FPS boost)

- Added a 6th Dharmapala, corresponding to the element water. The ice wolf freezes the sea and a blizzard rages down on Jonah's environment
- Fixed lighting and fog settings to work with the newest Oculus runtime
- Added streaming layers for each level and map component, including individual setdressing of the monastery and the island building interiors

Currently I'm working on multiple AI scripts and some finetuning of the Obersturmführer Aiming animations (I want his head and the gun to move with the flight direction of the player)